Webbiquity: 1) The unified management of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing and social PR supported by web presence optimization (WPO) metrics. 2) Being omnipresent on the web when buyers are looking for what you sell. 3) Measurement and management of owned, earned and paid media. Webbiquity – be everywhere online.

What sets this software apart is its approach as much as its functionality; the people behind gShift understand that SEO, online PR, social media, PPC advertising and other tactics are each pieces of the larger web presence puzzle. They aren’t silos, but tactics that need to be used in a coordinated manner to maximize and optimize an organization’s online presence. gShift is the first software built from the ground up with that approach in mind.

Features

gShift enables marketers or agencies to track unlimited websites, web pages, social media accounts, external pages (e.g. media mentions), competitors and countries. The only limit is on keywords tracked, which is the basis of gShift’s pricing (see “Limitations and Concerns” below).

The software doesn’t provide a way to automatically segregate branded from unbranded search keywords (which would be nice), but this can be set up manually using “Campaigns.” Campaigns are gShift’s method for creating different keyword groups to track (e.g., by product line, country, competitor, etc.). The ability to show country-based rankings (e.g., U.S. results for a company.com site, Canadian results for a company.ca site) is helpful.

gShift automatically tracks organic vs. paid vs. mobile (an increasingly important segment) traffic and goal conversions for each. Yes, you could do this from Google Analytics (GA) as well (in fact, gShift pulls a fair amount of its reporting data from GA) but gShift presents it all in one spot, attractively graphed out.

Backlinks remain a key component of SEO. gShift displays backlinks by site, backlinks by page (very helpful), backlinks by competitor, and even provides a list of “recommended backlink” sources. For your website, gShift will display your top backlinks by authority and referral visits, along with changes in backlinks over time.

For your competitors, the software identifies their target terms (anchor text in backlinks), top backlinks and ranking. From a pure competitive research standpoint, gShift isn’t quite as robust as a tool like SEMRush (which provides AdWords keywords and click costs in addition to complete target organic keywords), but it does offer significant integrated functionality nonetheless.

The ability to track external pages is another nice feature. gShift enables you to set up external pages to track in different categories: Press Releases, Blogs, social media accounts, videos, and shortened URLs (e.g. bit.ly URL links). It also finds and shows you “other pages in your pool,” referring pages you may not know to track. The software displays traffic, conversions, bounce rate, social shares and search rank on assigned keywords for all of these pages. Again, most of this data (other than search rank) could be pulled from GA, but gShift makes it much easier and faster to track these metrics.

For any given keyword, gShift will show the top ranking page on your site by search engine (though it won’t identify the page with the highest internal gShift score for that keyword, which would be another nice feature). gShift has partnered with WordStream for its integrated keyword research functionality.

In addition to the keywords you are tracking, gShift will display recommended keywords from GA as well as all keywords that have produced at least one goal conversion. What’s more, gShift recently announced capability that gives search marketers a pretty good idea of what’s behind the “not provided” keyword data in GA, by showing you which pages are being accessed along with the top keywords driving traffic to those pages.

gShift features extensive social media tracking capabilities as well, pulling analytics from Twitter (e.g. number of mentions and retweets), LinkedIn and YouTube all into one spot. For your videos on YouTube, gShift displays rankings for those videos on specified keywords with YouTube’s search function as well as Google rankings for those videos by keyword phrase.

Again, most of these social media metrics are freely available, but gShift saves the time and effort of tracking them all down from their native sources. gShift currently provides about 75% of the data available natively from the top social networks, with more metrics on the product roadmap (e.g. expanded LinkedIn metrics are anticipated to be added within the next 30-60 days).

The power of gShift lies in its efficiency for reporting (GA-type site data, social media metrics, and ranking plus performance of external assets like guest posts or news releases all in one tool), its SEO improvement functionality, and its actionable on-site and off-site metrics. Reporting is flexible; gShift enables administrators to add explanatory or analytical text comments to virtually any metric within a report.

Few (if any) other SEO and/or social media management tools provide the type of detailed data about a blog post, web page, external article or news release that gShift does because other tools don’t “ask the right questions.” Competitive tools tend to be more siloed, while gShift takes a web presence optimization-centered approach.

Future Plans

gShift aggressively updates the product with new features. Among plans for coming releases are “engagement signals,” which will display, for example, how many people have commented anywhere (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) about a specified blog post or other piece of content.

Competition

gShift’s closest competitor is possibly SEOmoz, a powerful SEO suite which just recently added social monitoring. From a straight SEO standpoint, it’s hard to beat the deep functionality of SEOmoz. However, what gShift may lack in depth in this area, it makes up for in ease of use and overall user experience. Put another way, gShift is arguably a better tool for marketers looking for reporting on site and external asset performance, and optimizing those assets for improvement. SEOmoz provides more raw technical data for hands-on webmasters.

Limitations and Concerns

Backlink checking is limited to the “top” 500 backlinks for any site, page or competitor. For internal site pages, that’s generally more than sufficient, but home pages on even moderately popular websites can have far more than 500 backlinks. There’s no way to know what’s missing (other than using a separate backlink checker tool).

The internal keyword tool shows monthly volume, but doesn’t indicate ranking difficulty—a key oversight. It does little good to know how popular a keyword phrase is without also knowing if it’s feasible to try to rank for that phrase. This should be high on gShift’s list of features to add, but for now, users will have to utilize a separate tool or technique for this function.

Pricing

In my opinion, gShift’s pricing is a tad high (for the SMB market) and the model is unnecessarily convoluted. The software is priced on the basis of “keyword rankings” (KRs). A KR is one keyword, on one website, in one country. And each keyword rank is automatically checked on a weekly basis, so a single keyword consumes four KRs in a month (or five in some months, one would suppose).

gShift’s baseline Small Business package (500 keyword rankings at $99 per month) sounds pretty reasonable, until you realize how quickly that can add up. 100 keywords, checked against one website in one country consumes 400 KRs per month. Add all of those keywords to one other country and that’s another 400 KRs. Check 20 of those keywords against three top competitors and that’s another (20 x 3 x 4 =) 240 KRs. In order to really make inroads into the SMB market where this product fits best, the pricing should ideally be somewhat lower and a whole lot simpler.

Bottom Line

While gShift Labs doesn’t necessarily provide the single best tool specifically for SEO management, or backlink checking, or keyword research, or social media monitoring—it is the only software currently available that combines pretty darn good functionality in all of these areas in a single platform.

gShift Labs is the first software vendor to approach SEO, online PR and social media as parts of the integrated whole of web presence optimization. Small to midsized businesses in the B2B space who want to maximize their online footprints and opportunities to be “found” when prospects are searching for what they offer should definitely evaluate gShift Labs.

FTC Disclosure: gShift Labs provided no compensation in any form for this review.

ths tool looks helpful and from “Backlinks remain a key component of SEO. gShift displays backlinks by site, backlinks by page (very helpful), backlinks by competitor, and even provides a list of “recommended backlink” sources” i think i will try it and see how it works

Tom, great review btw, I have to agree with your pricing observation, seems high for the convenience and improved user experience… The comprehensive and consolidated approach it’s great, I wish there was a “one to all” publishing feature included where content can be broadcasted with a single click across the various distributions channels (site, email, blog, social media, etc). The ideal solution would include all aspects of web presence marketing. Hopefully that’s something they consider as well for the future development.

Tom

Thanks Florin. Agreed, I would have liked to see pricing a bit more aggressive. But to the company’s credit, they do continue to add functionality The reporting, for example, was dreadfully slow in v 1.0; it is orders of magnitude faster in the most recent release.

This is a very comprehensive review. As the Co-founder and CTO of gShift Labs, I am very pleased that an expert search marketer enjoys the web presence data that we are monitoring and reporting on.

Our latest version is now available with the following highlights:
– lighting fast reporting and export to PDF functionality
– white labeling capabilities for agencies
– increase social signal data monitoring and capture
– accurate local keyword ranking results in Google
– increased investment in our backlink data
– discovery, recommendations and suggestions throughout the software to help with discovering search opportunities

We have revised our pricing and have made it less complex to understand. I believe that if you compare apples to apples, you will find gShift very competitive with our pricing.

I look forward to providing you with more updates as we aggressively roll-out more features – that I believe will be game changing this fall.

I think this tool looks great. It helps us to manage web presence optimisation. It also displays backlinks which is very useful. But the prcing looks quite high. Apart from that the product is awesome. Keep up the good work.

Tom

The pricing isn’t bad for all of the functionality offered. Also, the company has recently taken steps to simplify their convoluted pricing model. It may be time for an updated review soon.

I have worked with this for one project, although it has all the SEO stuffs integrated at single place. It is not easier to operate then other niche seo product. It is definitely a go-to solution if u need unified software for all things seo.

Tom

Thanks for sharing your experience Sara. I view as more of a marketing-oriented SEO tool than a technical-oriented application.

I have also used gShift for managing one of my client project and I find it a bit complex to operate initially. Though price is definitely bit high but as it provides a single interface to manage all activities I felt it time saver for me. Starting with gSift takes some time to understand but once I get it right, it makes things easier and faster.

Tom

Great points Morgan. I’ve been a bit frustrated by their practice of adding features then removing them (e.g., backlink popularity) but I know they are working on this.